RSVP for Part Two: "Past" (1/16/20) and Part Three: "Now" (2/13/21)

Join us for part one of a three-part Virtual Book Conversation Series with contributors to Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest! December's event features the "Home" panel and will include Tara L. Conley, Aaron K. Foley, Kisha Nicole Foster, Njaimeh Njie, Courtney Wise Randolph, Mark V. Reynolds, Terrence Shambley Jr., and Terrion L. Williamson.

What are the conditions of home for black midwesterners living with the realities of postindustrial decline, widespread economic insecurity, deteriorating infrastructure, racialized terror, and climate catastrophe? How and why do we continue making home here? Or, what if we no longer call this place home? How might our conceptualizations of home alter the landscape?

Copies of Black in the Middle are available here on our ready-to-ship website, which also has a wide selection of recommended and best-selling books, store merch, book subscription boxes, and more. You can request specific books you don't see on the site through this form, too. All orders ship from our store in Pittsburgh.

You can also purchase Black in the Middle, as well as several of these contributors' books, on our Bookshop.org list for recent and upcoming events. Check out our curated lists and picks on our main Bookshop.org affiliate page, or use the search bar in the upper center-right to look for any book. (Using the book's ISBN usually works best.)

This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 12/12. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.

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About Black in the Middle:

Essays about the Black experience in Middle America

Black Americans have been among the hardest hit by the rapid deindustrialization and accompanying economic decline that have become so synonymous with the Midwest. Since the 2016 election, many traditional media outlets have renewed attention on the conditions of “Middle America,” but the national discourse continues to marginalize the Black people who live there. Black in the Middle brings the voices of Black Midwesterners front and center. Filled with compelling personal narratives, thought-provoking art, and searing commentaries, this anthology explores the various meanings and experiences of blackness throughout the Rust Belt, the Midwest, and the Great Plains. Bringing together people from major metropolitan centers like Detroit and Chicago as well as smaller cities and rural areas where the lives of Black residents have too often gone unacknowledged, this collection is a much-needed corrective to the narrative of the region.

About tonight's contributors:

Tara L. Conley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. She is an interdisciplinary Black feminist scholar and mediamaker. In 2013, Dr. Conley founded Hashtag Feminism (www.hashtagfeminism.org) to locate and archive feminist discourse by way of tracking Twitter hashtags on the web. In 2015, she produced the documentary Brackish about life in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Dr. Conley’s research centers Black life in the study and exploration of place, media histories, and technoculture. Drawing on her life experiences growing up in Northeast, Ohio, Dr. Conley's creative nonfiction essays on Black life in the Rust Belt have appeared in Bloomberg, ZORA Magazine, and in the anthology Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest. You can learn more about Dr. Conley’s work and upcoming projects by visiting www.taralconley.org.

Aaron K. Foley is the founding director of the Black Media Initiative at the Center for Community Media at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Previously, he was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, chief storyteller for the City of Detroit, and editor of BLAC Detroit Magazine. He is also an author and veteran freelance journalist, having contributed to “This American Life,” The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review and more.

Kisha Nicole Foster is a mother, poet, and is the recipient of the 2019 Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artist in Literature. She is the author of Poems: 1999-2014 (GTK Press, 2015) and Bloodwork (Outlandish Press, 2018). Foster is also in her fourth year as Regional Coordinator for Poetry Out Loud, a program of The Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, sponsored through The Ohio Arts Council. She is a two-time Pink Door Fellow. IG: @iamkishanicolefoster.

Njaimeh Njie is a photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia producer. Her work documents contemporary Black life, with a particular focus on the past shapes the present. Njie’s work has been featured in outlets including CityLab, Belt Magazine, and the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Storyboard Blog, and she has presented at venues including TEDxPittsburghWomen, Harvard University, and Carnegie Mellon University. Among several awards and grants, Njie was named the 2019 Visual Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh City Paper, and the 2018 Emerging Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Njie is the Founder/Lead Producer of the nonfiction storytelling company, Eleven Stanley Productions, and she earned her B.A. in Film and Media Studies in 2010 from Washington University in St. Louis. http://www.njaimehnjie.com/

Courtney Wise Randolph is a writer, freelance audio producer, and a Culture and Community Reporter at Detour Detroit. https://www.keencomp.com/

Mark V. Reynolds, a Chicagoan born and raised in Cleveland, has written extensively from the intersection of history, culture, and race as an essayist, journalist, and cultural critic since 1989. He has been a contributor to Popmatters.com since 2004, and in 2005 received an Ohio Society of Professional Journalists award for media criticism in Urban Dialect magazine. Additional credits include the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cleveland Free Times, and Black Meetings & Tourism magazine. His essay, “Race and Kindness in Yellow Springs, OH” was published in the Belt Publishing anthology Red State Blues: Stories from Midwestern Life on the Left (2018).

Terrence Shambley Jr. (they/them/theirs) is a writer and poet born and raised in Saint Paul. In college they are studying creative writing, philosophy and a self-designed major in African American Studies with a concentration in radical imagination. Their writing explores the intersections of family, community justice and radical politics. Terrence is currently working on their debut novel, which follows the story of A’home, a time-traveling island-nation created by the freedom dreams of Black radicals. Some of their work can be found in Belt Publishing’s Black in The Middle and poets.org.   

Terrion L. Williamson is an associate professor of African American & African Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota where she also serves as the director of the Black Midwest Initiative. Her first book, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life, was published by Fordham University Press in 2017 and explores, in part, the conditions of working-class black life in her hometown of Peoria, Illinois. She is the editor of Black in the Middle. https://www.theblackmidwest.com/